Monday, 30 October 2006

People are posting queries and responses all the time on a huge number of geographic, surname and other miscellaneous Rootsweb mailing lists. Its a full time job trying to monitor all your lines of interest, and you have to sought through a lot of extraneous material, sometimes opinionated tripe, to find relevant stuff.

Here's a handy resource to save searching year by year and list by list. The heading reads Test Concept so presumably its not fully support, but seems to do a pretty good job. Just enter a search term and Rootsweb will do the searching for you. This is a case where it really pays to spend a bit of time learning and applying more advanced search techniques to reduce the number and increase the quality of hits. From the site search tips file:

Search for a phrase by putting quotes around a group of words, like "john jones"

Perform a single character wildcard search using "?". For example, j?nes will find jones and janes

Perform a multiple wildcard search using "*". This will look for zero or more characters, so jon* will find jon, jones, and jonson

Use "AND" to require the search to find all words or phrases. "john AND jones" will only return results with both words

Use "NOT" to exclude words or phrases. For example "john NOT jones" will return all results with the word john but not jones.